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As seen in the BP Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico last year, ExxonMobil's pipeline spill in Montana this summer, and again with Shell's recent spill in the North Sea, the public expects reasonable transparency when disclosing the magnitude of oil spills and the scope and progress of spill response efforts.

In each case, the amount of oil spilled was calculated by the party responsible for the spill and the industry and government response effort was sized to reflect these estimates. Each time, the responsible party initially dramatically underestimated the spill size and the potential environmental impacts.

Nobody likes bad news, but industry's trivializing and significantly underestimating the magnitude and consequences of a problem it has caused doesn't engender public confidence. Estimating spill volumes can be extremely challenging, but, when public access to information and local community participation in spill response efforts are severely limited, it exacerbates mistrust.

We live in an environment of readily available cameras and electronic communications. Any significant visible disconnect between reality and what is reported is captured and becomes newsworthy. The public and media outcry is loud and predictable, but, with a few tweaks to the incident management process, it could be prevented. Retired U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, national incident commander for the response to the Gulf spill, has publicly lamented what he called the "social and political nullification of the National Response Plan" during that response. (The National Response Plan, which grew out of the federal Oil Pollution Act of 1990, establishes a nationwide framework for dealing with oil spills.)

The public isn't keen to see the government eagerly "partnering" with an oil industry entity that doesn't appear particularly trustworthy or competent at the moment of an ongoing oil spill. But that's exactly what the National Response Plan calls for.

It is only right that the party responsible for the spill should mount and fund an appropriately robust clean up. But it is not acceptable that industry should visibly lead the response, appear to be unchallenged when informing, or potentially misinforming, regulators and the public on how serious a spill is, and then restrict public access to reports of damage and spill response information.

Firing back at a skeptical media and public with statistics like miles of boom and the numbers of boats and people deployed comes across as a smoke screen and doesn't really answer the questions that often need answering. Faced with this scenario earlier this year, Montana's governor removed his representatives from the Unified Command, the spill response management team made up of the government and the responsible party. Public trust requires regulatory independence and transparency in disclosing the size of the problem and how the public's interests are being protected.

In Alaska, I'm happy to report, we have a relatively high level of transparency during oil-spill responses. The Department of Environmental Conservation takes part in the Unified Command. The department establishes a real-time public website where summaries of the spill size estimate, descriptions of the actions taken, and goals of the response team are posted. This information is the guts of what is called an "Incident Action Plan." This information-sharing model seems to work and promote public trust. Years later, one can still go back and see how, at any point in an Alaskan spill response, the folks working in the public's interest understood the magnitude of the problem and organized their response efforts.

In an era of limited public funding and an increasingly complex oil industry with offshore and underground operations, it is difficult for governments and regulators to have the expertise to independently verify industry estimates of spill severity and impact and to direct appropriate spill response efforts with transparency. Allowing industry to make many of the estimates and drive many of the "who gets what information" decisions during a spill response under the umbrella of the Unified Command further erodes public trust and is not in the long term interests of the public, the government, or of industry.

Alaska's model of state-directed transparency in incident response and the federally mandated citizen stakeholder involvement in oil spill prevention and response for Alaska's Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound, put in place after the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989, are good models that address these recurring transparency and public trust issues.

With the national media reporting that trust in our oil industry and our government is at historic lows, hindering the safe and environmentally responsible development of our natural resources, isn't it time to learn from past disasters and improve how effectively we prevent and respond to future spills by maximizing transparency and accountability to the public?

• Mark Swanson is executive director of the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens' Advisory Council